Jon Funderud the CEO of Seaweed Solutions. Since 2009, they have been a pioneer in building up Europe’s seaweed production, collaborating with players across the value chain to set up and establish growing and cultivation. Seaweed is an incredible raw material. Regenerative, sustainable, and versatile seaweed is being used for animal feeds, food ingredients, biofuels, bio-plastics, and pharmaceuticals. It is estimated that the seaweed market will grow to 9.3 billion euro by 2030, 30% of which could be captured by Europe. This episode is a crash course on seaweed’s potential. We dive into what’s unfolding in Norway and beyond and why seaweed is such a big deal.
- 6:30 Seaweed’s many applications
- 15:30 The up and coming European market
- 22:00 Ways of farming seaweed
- 31:30 Seaweed Solutions operations
- 37:00 Why industry collaborations matter
Interested in learning more about oceans and the future of food? Check out this series of podcasts. Find the full report on Seaweed in Europe here.
Related Links
🌊 More episodes on ocean farming in the Nordics
🐚 Does your community have an ocean farm?
🚭 Forget seaweed, why hemp is nature’s misunderstood supercrop
🐟 Iceland a.k.a. The Silicon Valley of Fish
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Episode Transcript
Analisa Winther, Nordic FoodTech Podcast Host 2:27
It’s always a little bit fun to get started with the origin story of the company. So, how did Seaweed Solutions get started?
Jon Funderud, Seaweed Solutions 2:36
Seaweed Solutions was founded in 2009 by a guy called Pål Bakken. He has a background from the seafood sector in Asia where he was selling the salmon to the Japanese market. And being in Asia, he also saw the widespread consumption of seaweed, which is something we don’t really know much about in Europe. We don’t eat seaweed, traditionally. But he saw that this was a major industry in Asia. And he thought, “Why has this not been done before in Europe?” and he wanted to bring seaweed farming to Norway and Europe.